I don’t buy into “wood” obviously meaning “sandalwood.” If you have lived with carpenters, they smell like fresh timber and sweat. So if that wasn’t an option, I don’t think the contestant was specific enough.
FriendOfDeSoto
Joined the Mayqueeze.
- 0 Posts
- 58 Comments
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Has Family Feud ever gone back and given someone an answer they got right?English27·2 days ago
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•assuming the world is undergoing a complete and radical transformation at the moment, what is preventing more people from "waking up" and seeing the trends happening?English2·3 days ago
The problems with describing this like one parabola are two-fold for me. If we look at the long arm of history, we as a species have been far less interconnected so knowledge wasn’t shared to the same extent it often is today. One of the reasons why a hypothetical Covid-819 would’ve killed more people. At the same time, various regions have gone through their own periods of trouble, dark ages, decays of empires, and religious doom. You’d have to interpolate quite heavily in the bottom part of the parabola to get started. Bronze tools could take a century to spread. Strictly speaking, Gutenberg didn’t invent book printing; China beat him to it. But the repercussions of his movable type were arguably far more reaching. Or more recently, the industrial revolution started around 1750 but didn’t affect a majority on this planet until about 50 years later. There were uncontacted people it never reached that were washed away by the 2006 tsunami. Where to plot these things on an overarching exponential graph become choices. And thus a statistic you’re forging yourself.
And then exponential means at some point we’re going to reach a point where we near constantly innovate stuff. You’d have to do the work of two scientific Nobel prizes before you had your first piss in the morning just to keep up with the pace. This pace of development isn’t sustainable. There has to be an out.
That’s why I would favour a model based on quantum leaps that show localised growth in hockey stick curves. Change today may seem fundamental and omnipresent. But 🫲 six seven 🫱 probably never reached North Korea.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•assuming the world is undergoing a complete and radical transformation at the moment, what is preventing more people from "waking up" and seeing the trends happening?English9·3 days ago
Can you back up the claim of exponential change? For my money we get occasional quantum leaps that end in hockey stick curves.
Technology isn’t everything.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•assuming the world is undergoing a complete and radical transformation at the moment, what is preventing more people from "waking up" and seeing the trends happening?English18·3 days ago
Does your research consider recency bias as well? More or less every generation looks at the world changing in front of them. And every generation considers this the most dramatic change ever. I remember the fall of the USSR and we all thought this is the most significant change in history - it was not. The internet and social media was the next big transformation and the sky was falling - we’re still here. All things considered, the generation in the right age bracket for military service in the late 1930s probably has a better claim on the most dramatic change happening in front of them. So I’m just wondering if you consider these biases?
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why is Japanese (language) popular than Mandarin for weebs? (Besides Anime)English5·4 days ago
The people in the nebulously defined West didn’t get into Asian comics first and then gravitated towards the Japanese offerings. Japanese manga companies saw a market for expansion and took advantage of it. Manga is Japanese in the minds of consumers. Most people probably aren’t aware of the Chinese or Korean varieties. Interest in the language came after.
Japanese may be easier to pronounce for us atonal alphabetters. I would say Chinese beats Japanese by having simpler grammar. None of these linguistic reasons matter though. There are plenty of people who learn mandarin today but they didn’t get into it through comics. Most Japanese learners don’t do it for business reasons. The stereotypes are different.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•Nokia 3310 with modern technology would only need to be charged once a monthEnglish7·5 days ago
I wonder if the more modern mobile network protocols require slightly more power than the 2-3G of old. It’s probably a rounding error; it would run forever™ minus an hour or so.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•What's the deal with using phonetic symbols here on Lemmy?English81·6 days ago
They give pronunciation guides. Or they’re effing around. It’s the internet.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*English6·7 days ago
What have rogue models effed with so far? A government website in Australia, derelict chat forums, and another AI company? I’m willing to believe that two things are happening at the same time. That sandboxing these agents will improve with these so-called breaches. And that companies like Amazon or Cloudflare are improving their security continuously with threat models. And if they don’t have rogue agents on their radar, that stack deserves to fall.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•You may have farted someone else's fart.English5·7 days ago
It would probably be a miracle if you hadn’t re-farted some molecules.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why is the shape ɪ banned from the internet?English5·7 days ago
Who specifically would you say banned it from the internet?
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•people keep saying that we need to lower our standards of living to live sustainably, while at the same time refusing to give up facebook and instagramEnglish21·7 days ago
Yes. The context was internet services.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•people keep saying that we need to lower our standards of living to live sustainably, while at the same time refusing to give up facebook and instagramEnglish122·8 days ago
Giving up Meta products wouldn’t be terrible. But it wouldn’t solve anything. The greatest environmental footprint is left by streaming, I think.
We should all get off the internet, yet here we are. Hypocrisy is the prequel to Idiocracy.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why can't both of these things be "pirated" if that's the right way to say it?English51·8 days ago
Because citizenship, employment, and torrenting are not the same thing. Torrenting by itself isn’t the same as pirating either because there are a handful of non arrrr uses for the protocol in real life. This question has the same quality of: why can’t I eat an apple, a bicycle, and the categorical imperative? Are you that obtuse or a bot?
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•If French people are strict about eating on a set schedule, then when do waiters and cooks eat?English2·9 days ago
I did! Thanks, I edited it.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•If French people are strict about eating on a set schedule, then when do waiters and cooks eat?English17·9 days ago
I have only briefly lived in France and it’s a way back also. I never got the impression they were inflexible about eating times.
Do those people take a different month off?
Yes. It may be time for time and not a whole month at a time. Also keep in mind that those workers aren’t full-timers. ContRacts tend to be time-limited in that field, i.e. people get hired for a season with no guarantee for work after that. So people plan their own vacation time.
Edited typo
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why do Pokémon have different names in ENG?English9·10 days ago
Just as an example that this sort of localisation also happens the other way around: Paw Patrol features Ryder as the human in charge of the crack hero dog outfit. He turned into the rather Japanese ケント or Kento over here. Ryder when turned into katakana is a little too close to “懶惰, 嬾惰 [らんだ, らいだ]: indolence, laziness, sloth, idleness.” And he is a dull smartass but to be fair to the lad he isn’t lazy.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•While everyone is trying to build a profitable business using AI, why can't AI companies make a profitable businesses using their own AI?English392·11 days ago
When potatoes came over from the New World, a lot of Europeans grew them as decorative plants. New shit makes people do weird stuff.
Not everybody is trying to make a business with so-called AI. The peddlers are just the loudest.
The companies promise their models can do all this stuff for paying customers. If the models were truly that capable, the so-called AI companies ought to be doing everything with them and be raking in the dough like mad. Which they’re not because they know the limitations of the models. It’s what economists call the bullshit gap between marketing and reality. And by economists I mean me.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•If I was on Windows 7 and couldn't change my OS, what VPN should I use to bypass censorship? If I shouldn't use a VPN, what would be a better way to bypass censorship?English444·12 days ago
Unless it’s an air gapped machine run for a specific reason, nobody should run Win7 in 2026. If it’s connected to the internet, you are doing that at your own peril. Obligatory switch to Linux.
“Censorship” is probably not quite the right word here, is it? You’re thinking more along the lines of privacy. Censorship is what a government does. And that would affect the content of the internet more than anything else you come in contact with. And that is roughly the same whether you run your browser on a Win7 or Win11 machine (save maybe some more modern features the outdated browsers cannot do).
If you’re worried about the spectre of age verification, I would suggest switching to Linux and investing into a VPN.
- FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.websitetoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•Fans of big franchises care a lot more about continuity than the creators doEnglish71·12 days ago
A memory wipe would make sense. Or they go back in time, say, to punch some more dinosaurs, come back, and there is just Bob at her station and nobody bats an eye because the timeline was changed. A reverse Sela (the RomYarLin from TNG) move. Because I’d like both of these solutions, I’m very positive they’ll find a far less satisfying one.
I have a strong suspicion that language prescribed by an Iranian official will have no bearing on what people call that region in English.
“Middle East” is a reference point from the British Isles where there is a more significant chunk of geography directly east of it. When you move into Central Europe, the ME region is called “near East” when translated literally. Because we are already a bit further east and the reference points change. There isn’t an English-language equivalent in the West because there’s mostly water.
Having exported this language to beyond mostly water to the new world, the designation stuck although it makes no sense from a North American perspective. If we all spoke a truly international version of Esperanto, things might be different. But that’s not how it worked out.
I don’t think ME as a term has acquired the same problematic stench as “orient” and variants thereof in English. Cardinal directions are quite resistant to that. The Confederate States of America haven’t ruined “South” as a term. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea hasn’t made “North” go out of style.